RAMP helps promising startups focus on the business side of doing business

Dressed in jeans, a blazer and tennis shoes, 22-year-old Jonathan Briganti looked the part of a Silicon Valley wunderkind pitching his tech startup.

Discussing his year-old company, Digitally Enhanced Screening Applications, or DESA, Briganti was so excited that words poured out of him like water from a hose. It seemed he couldn’t speak fast enough to describe the startup, a health analytics and telehealth platform that collects real-time data through screening assessments to improve patient care. He had a few minutes to describe the company, which was birthed from a hackathon in 2016 when Briganti was an undergrad at Virginia Tech.

Briganti is a scientist, but last Monday he looked more like a businessman. DESA is one of six businesses taking part in the first Regional Acceleration and Mentoring Program, better known as RAMP, Roanoke’s first business accelerator. Each business went through a 12-week entrepreneurship bootcamp, with RAMP providing mentors, classes and networking opportunities as well as a swanky office space in RAMP’s building on South Jefferson Street.

RAMP held its first “Demo Day” at Virginia Western Community College last week, with each business given a few minutes to share what it’s been doing. The event drew about 120 people from the business community, a mix of professionals involved with RAMP, economic development officials and potential investors from around the state.

“I wouldn’t have been able to do that presentation three months ago,” Briganti said afterward, crediting RAMP with helping him hone his business skills and ability to pitch.

“We learned how to stop being just scientists,” he said. “RAMP made us stronger as a business.”

RAMP is unlike other startup programs in the region. It’s a business accelerator designed to provide startups with resources to help them grow and stay in the region. It’s different from incubators, which work with startups in earlier development stages, and co-working spaces, which provide easy-to-access space for startups. RAMP looked for businesses that already had an established plan and were on the cusp of something bigger. The six companies selected for the first cohort were a mixed bag of entrepreneurs. Briganti was the youngest company president to participate. Other participants had been running their business for years. Each had different goals and different needs.

For example, Flex Metrics, which makes production analytics tools for manufacturing, was founded in 1998 and has already signed a lease for the entire first floor of the Gill Memorial Building, where RAMP is located, to house its 10 employees.

Flex Metrics by SoftSolutions CEO Jay Foster said he wanted to be part of RAMP to take the business to the next level. He’s seeking $1 million in equity financing.

“It allowed me to work on the business and not just in the business,” Foster said of his experience.

RAMP’s first cohort includes business owners who know their products backward and forward but wanted help on the business side. The entrepreneurs each said that the most valuable aspect of the accelerator has been the deep connections they’ve made with business owners in the community who helped guide them.

The entrepreneurs were assigned mentors and attended classes and workshops that dealt with operating specifics: Do they need a lawyer, a banker, or a potential investor? Professionals with RAMP helped them find the right people to get in front of, said the accelerator’s director, Mary Miller. A major part of the program was helping each business assess where it was as a company, through eyes other than the founders’. She said she worked with each business, providing “hugs, hand-holding and kicks in the butt.”

“That was the biggest struggle for AFT — the business thing,” said Josh May, CEO of Autonomous Flight Technologies. “We are drone guys. These guys helped us say, ‘Yeah, you are drone guys, but you are on the cusp of something huge so you’ve got to get guys that will help with the business end of things.’”

Turning a hobby into a business, May launched AFT in 2012 with the goal of flying drones commercially. He and two other founders are using some of the connections they made through RAMP to help launch the business on a much larger scale; they hope to initiate licensing and franchising across the U.S. and are thinking bigger than they have before.

While some of the businesses in RAMP are seeking investment, others, like AFT, are just looking for partnerships and referrals. May said 80 percent of AFT’s business comes from referrals, so making business connections is essential.

“We are hoping to capitalize on these relationships we’ve met through RAMP for years and years in the Roanoke Valley,” May said. “They know people we’ve never heard of, or people in the valley we could never get in touch with. It’s just a phone call to them.”

The networking connections and mentorship aspect of RAMP were so important to Baraka Kasongo, CEO of Volatia, that he decided to create an advisory board for his company’s development. Volatia provides language interpretation and translation services through a network of interpreters and proprietary software that makes the business more efficient. The business operated out of the Grandin CoLab before coming to RAMP. It has six-full time and three part-time employees, but Kasongo said he plans to hire 15 more in 2018 as the business develops. He also wants to move Volatia into its own building.

He sought RAMP’s assistance with the growth.

“RAMP actually re-emphasized the idea that our growth was not the direct business-to-business but our software,” he said. “So I almost prided myself all the time, before RAMP, in saying we are not a technology company. We just use technology to manage our resources. And now, I’m like, we are a technology company.”

While the bootcamp portion of RAMP has wrapped up, Miller said the program continues. The participants are allowed to stay in the RAMP building until the next cohort arrives early in 2018. Robert McAden, CEO of the Roanoke-Blacksburg Technology Council, which is one of RAMP’s organizers, said they are starting a fundraising campaign to raise $1.5 million to keep RAMP in operation for the next five years.

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